In the office equipment industry, it is common that different types of office equipment, such as copiers, printers, and facsimiles, exist on a network in order to communicate with various computers. In the case of a printer or digital copier, image data often originates at a computer and is communicated over the network to the copier or printer. In addition to basic functions, administrative functions relating to the office equipment take place over the network as well. A key administrative function in any office is the apportionment of billing for the various functions performed by various machines. If a selected printer within a large office outputs a certain number of prints, it is desirable to assign the cost of the printing either to the human user who requested the prints, to a particular client of the office for whom the prints were made, and/or to a particular job being fulfilled for the client. In other words, it is desirable to assign costs of various activities, such as printing or copying, either by user, by customer, by job, by another category, or by a combination of these categories.
At the same time, in certain office situations, it is desirable to make occasional exceptions to a standard billing policy. It may be desired to permit certain functions of certain equipment to be unbilled, such as short jobs in machines at certain locations. It may be desired to permit a color-capable printer to output monochrome prints free to the user, while requiring billing for color prints. Also, in a realistic office situation, the necessary user, client, and job ID's may not be easily available to a user at the time the job is requested. It may be desirable to allow jobs to be output without entry of the necessary billing information, and allow the billing information to be submitted after the job is done.
The present invention relates to a flexible system for administrating a plurality of office equipment machines, enabling a system administrator to specify what types of billing information are required for each of a variety of machines, and also specify, to individual machines in a system, what the machine should do when the required billing information is not entered at the time of job submission.